Rust-Lightning is a Bitcoin Lightning library written in Rust. The main crate,
lightning, does not handle networking, persistence, or any other I/O. Thus,
it is runtime-agnostic, but users must implement basic networking logic, chain
interactions, and disk storage.
The lightning-net-tokio crate implements Lightning networking using the
Tokio async runtime.
The project implements all of the BOLT specifications in the 1.0 spec except for channel queries. The implementation has pretty good test coverage that is expected to continue to improve. There are a number of internal refactorings being done now that will make the code base more welcoming to new contributors. It is also anticipated that as developers begin using the API, the lessons from that will result in changes to the API, so any developer using this API at this stage should be prepared to embrace that. The current state is sufficient for a developer or project to experiment with it. Recent increased contribution rate to the project is expected to lead to a high quality, stable, production-worthy implementation in 2020.
Communications for Rust-Lightning and Lightning Development Kit happens through LDK slack.
The goal is to provide a full-featured but also incredibly flexible lightning implementation, allowing the user to decide how they wish to use it. With that in mind, everything should be exposed via simple, composable APIs. The user should be able to decide whether they wish to use their own threading/execution models, allowing usage inside of existing library architectures, or allow us to handle that for them. Same goes with network connections - if the user wishes to use their own networking stack, they should be able to do so! This all means that we should provide simple external interfaces which allow the user to drive all execution, while implementing sample execution drivers that create a full-featured lightning daemon by default.
For security reasons, do not add new dependencies. Really do not add new non-optional/non-test/non-library dependencies. Really really do not add dependencies with dependencies. Do convince Andrew to cut down dependency usage in rust-bitcoin.
"Rust-Lightning, not Rusty's Lightning!"
Contributors are warmly welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
For a Rust-Lightning high-level API introduction, see ARCH.md.
License is either Apache-2.0 or MIT, at the option of the user (ie dual-license Apache-2.0 and MIT).